Singing the News in the Eighteenth Century. A Media Perspective on Norwegian Skilling Ballads

Abstract

This essay delineates the role of the news ballad in the development of an early modern media culture in Norway. By defining the news ballad as a conveyer of accurate intelligence, the essay shows how skilling ballads conveyed news before the newspapers, and it asks to what degree skilling ballads changed after the coming of the first printed newspapers in the 1760s. The essay explores the functions the earliest news ballads may have had in eighteenth-century society, and it argues that these multifaceted but entirely unstudied texts should be given recognition in the history of the development of a Norwegian media culture.